oses_. I placed it with Messrs Alston Rivers, Ltd., whose standard of
respectability was beyond attachment. They read the book without, so far
as I remember, any ill effects; at least I saw no signs of corruption in
the managing director and the secretary; the maidenly reserve of the
lady shorthand-typist seemed unblemished. But some horrid internal
convulsion must have suddenly occurred in the firm; they must have lost
their nerve; or perhaps my corrupting influence was gradual and
progressive; at any rate, they suddenly sent the book to their legal
adviser, who wired back that it would almost certainly be prosecuted. So
the contract was not signed, and if I had not, in those days, been an
enthusiastic young man who longed to be prosecuted, I might never have
published the book at all; the moral pressure might have been enough to
keep it down. But I offered it to many publishers, all of whom rejected
it, at the same time asking whether some milder spring might not be
struck from the rock of my imagination, until I came across Mr Frank
Palmer, who was a brave man. I offered him that book, cropped of about
seventy pages, which I thought so true to life that I realised they must
cause offence. He accepted it. Those were beautiful times, and I knew an
exquisite day when I decided to chance the prosecution. I remember the
bang of the MS. as it dropped into the post box; garbling an old song, I
thought: 'Good-bye, good-bye, ye lovely young girls, we're off to Botany
Bay.'

The police treated me very scurvily; they took no notice at all. The
book was banned by all libraries owing to its alleged hectic qualities,
and in due course achieved a moderate measure of scandalous success. I
tell this story to show that had I been a sweet and shrinking soul, that
if Mr Palmer had not shared in my audacity, the book would not have been
published. We should not have been stopped, but we should have been
frightened off, and this, I say, is the force that keeps down sincere
novels, deep down in the muddy depths of their authors' imagination.

Now and then a publisher dares, and dares too far. Such is the case of
_The Rainbow_, by Mr D. H. Lawrence, where the usual methods of Puritan
terrorism were applied, where the publisher was taken into court, and
made to eat humble pie, knowing that if he refused he must drink
hemlock. Certainly _The Rainbow_ was a bad book, for it was an
ill-written book, a book of hatred and desire ... but many of u